Wednesday is soccer day. One
of our regular players, hoping to show a friend how to meet up with
us, discovered Google
Maps. After trying it for two minutes, it's easy to see why
Google is losing the innovation edge.

It's not hard to guess that users will flock to dynamic,
interactive interfaces like Google Maps and GMail. This sort of
behavior is often described as sheep-like, but it more closely
resembles a less common mammal: the naked mole-rat.[1] Without any
ability to regulate their own temperature, they face what seems
like an inevitable choice: cooperate with the hive or die.

But if people behave like small mammals, they would do well to
imitate a different one. The star-nosed
mole can identify an object as edible and consume it in less
than 250 milliseconds. It's no coincidence that the star-nosed
mole's claws are curved like parentheses.

Google Maps is essentially a large Javascript application. Great
hackers have an almost instinctual aversion to Javascript. Google
is betting its future on something a tasteful programmer's radar
rejects.

Everyone I've asked agrees that Javascript is nasty and
tasteless.[2] It's not hard to see that it would be a waste of a
hacker's time to be proficient enough in Javascript to create an
elaborate, interesting, interactive application in it. But few
people have looked beneath their natural revulsion to find
Javascript's deeper flaw: curly braces.

The curly brace is not a natural thing to write. Giambattista
Bodoni initially rejected the curly brace characters, and only
pressure from American printers persuaded him to include it in his
typefaces.[3] Algol 60 lacked curly braces, but nearly all of its
descendents have them.

Languages which avoid curly braces attract hackers like a
W. Somerset Maugham novel attracts thoughtful and sensitive readers,
or a Brueghel painting attracts hackers who are also painters. Many
people do not know exactly why they find Python so appealing, but it's
not hard to guess: the almost complete lack of curly braces speaks to
a deep aesthetic instinct that few closely examine. To find hackers
with an innate sense of taste, look for those who love Python, even if
they can't articulate why.

Viaweb did not rely on client-side Javascript, fancy cascading
style sheets, or dynamic content generation.[4] Yet it was effective
enough that Yahoo! bought it for $49.6 million. $49.6 million will buy a
lot of time for reflecting on the things that really matter, such as
why Google Maps and GMail
represent one step in the road to intellectual and cultural bankruptcy
for Google.

Notes

[1] In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi wrote: "I must also
mention another peculiar and beneficent consequence of CS [Customer
Service]: by pretending to esteem and like your fellow men, after a
few years in this trade you wind up really doing so, just as someone
who feigns madness for a long time actually becomes crazy." Also,
naked mole rats are pretty neat.

[2] Eric S. Raymond has zero lines of Javascript in fetchmail.

[3] Benjamin Franklin, a contemporary of Bodoni's, was among those
who applied the pressure. He wrote in his Autobiography
of "that publick desire for brackets which sadly must be
acquiesc'd."

[4] CSS is also tainted by curly braces. I read a book that
explained CSS with an example like this:
a { color: blue }

Microsoft may not have great hackers, but I think they deliberately
make Internet Explorer incompatible with this curly brace-infested
syntax.